Snow
by hallyuvian
Summary: A month after they've started dating, James and Lily both go home for the Christmas holidays, but one night James misses Lily too much, and goes to visit her. Their reunion is laced with the unspoken love they have for each other and their fear of He Who Must Not Be Named. UGH I'm terrible at writing summaries T T. But don't let that deter you! Please read and review .


It was negative 15 degrees outside and James Potter was standing below Lily Evans's bedroom window. There was a newly-fallen cover of glittering snow on the ground, James's footprints the only disturbance in its otherwise flawless surface. The clouds had deposited it in hasty buckets an hour before, and had departed just as quickly. Now the snow shone periwinkle under the unreal blue-purple sky that characterizes clear midwinter nights, a few flakes swirling in the wind that seemed to be blowing every direction at once. It was beautiful and idyllic and James didn't know what to do.

He and Lily had started dating just a month before, and were still caught in the fervor of a new relationship, their craving for each other's company endless and insatiable. This didn't precisely mesh well with the fact that they had both elected to go home for the Christmas holidays. James had gone home because his parents had insisted on it. They, like many other wizarding parents, were growing more and more nervous about the ever-increasing power of the dark wizard Voldemort (known by most as "You Know Who" or "He Who Must Not Be Named"), and, gripped by the unspoken panic that had settled over the wizarding world like a thick pea-soup fog, wanted to spend as much time with their children as possible. They were spurred on by the subconscious and unacknowledged awareness that each second could be their last.

Being at home away from Lily had finally become too much for James, despite the frequent letters they wrote to each other, and, in a fit of sleeplessness and infatuation, he had donned a Muggle coat and rushed from his slumbering house into the frigid December night. He had apparated to a park that Lily had told him about. It was usually empty, she had said, and she often used it for apparating. And so James had materialized next to the swing set, eyes closed and hoping that there was no one around. Shivering and fortunately unseen, James found a gap in the hedge that separated the park from the street, and then made his way to Lily's house, which he knew was just across the road from the park. Now he was there, standing in the periwinkle snow. As the heat spell he had cast after he arrived in the park began to fade, James stared at Lily's closed and darkened window and wondered what he should do. His wand was firmly sequestered within the inside pocket of his coat, but the Muggle street was illuminated every few feet by tall black lamps, and, though most people were probably asleep, he was too wary of discovery to cast anything more conspicuous than a heat spell. Then, struck by a sudden idea, James plunged his ungloved hand into the deep layer of snow at his feet and, the cold stinging his fingers, formed a handful of snow into a small, tightly-packed ball. Then, pulling back his arm, he hurled it upwards at Lily's window.

Lily herself stared at the blue-purple sky through a frosty glass windowpane. Her multitude of blankets lay heavy and protective over her, but her piercingly green eyes remained firmly open. It had been two hours since she went to bed, and she still had not been able to fall asleep. Her head was too full of James and He Who Must Not Be Named and the acuteness with which she now felt her own mortality. Her parents, Muggles that they were, did not feel the same panic that James's did, but Lily herself felt deeply the stab of terror which accompanied the name of every new murder victim printed in the _Daily Prophet_ in that deceptively and, Lily thought darkly, ironically innocuous black text. The particular zeal with which He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's followers murdered Muggleborns had only contributed to Lily's newfound awareness of the paper-thin barrier between life and death, and had imbued her with a desire to see her family at every chance she got. This was not, however, the reason she gave to her parents or herself. Even admitting it to herself, shaping the words in her head, would make it too real and too horrifying. So instead she had told her mother that because James and most of her friends were going home for the Christmas holidays, she wanted to go home as well. She had repeated this excuse vehemently to herself as her quill scratched it onto the letter she would then send home.

It was then, as Lily's thoughts had just begun to drag her into the daze that tends to come with pensiveness, that a clump of white snow hit her window, exploding tremendously and coating part of the glass in a thin layer of white. Jerked sharply from her oncoming daze, Lily bolted upright and stared at the window in bafflement. That had been a snowball, and it had to have been thrown by someone. Nervousness gripped her and she swung her legs out of bed, wincing when the cold wood floor of her bedroom touched her bare feet. She pressed her face against the glass in an effort to see the ground below, and there, standing in the snow, so much more vivid to her than the bite of the icy glass pressed against her cheek, was a tall, thin, messy-haired someone who made her heart skip a beat.

Lily didn't react right away. This must be a dream, a hopeful vision. She had, after all, missed James bitterly ever since she had said goodbye to him at King's Cross about a week and a half ago. Couldn't wanting something, wanting something very badly, trick your mind into believing it was there? She could have sworn she had read about something like that somewhere. But after blinking a few times and even pinching her arm, she could find no evidence that James was any more a vision than her own hands, so she turned suddenly from the window, hastily pushing her bare feet into her galoshes and donning her winter coat, grabbed her wand from her bedside table, and, casting a hasty _lumos_ spell so she could see in the darkness of her house, rushed downstairs. When she had made her way outside and around to the side of the house where James was, Lily stopped. He was there, clad in Muggle jeans and coat, his dark hair standing on end and his brown creased as looked somewhat anxiously up at Lily's window. She took a step forward to approach him, and, hearing the snow crunch beneath her boot, he turned his head, smiling a smile which would never be enough to convey the warmth which rose within him at the sight of her.

"Hey there, Evans!" he said, his voice casual, jovial, teasing.

Lily wanted to run to him, to throw her arms around him and bury her face in the softness of his coat, breath in his scent, but she restrained herself. Instead, she walked nonchalantly toward him, raising her hand in greeting. "Potter, what are you doing outside my house in the middle of the night? Just couldn't wait to see me?" she asked, grinning at him.

Her words hung in the air, the truth of them echoing unspoken in both teenagers' minds. In James's hazel eyes Lily saw the weight her words carried, saw it coming towards her as in four steps he closed the distance between them and pulled her to him. Lily closed her eyes and let the pretense of casualness fall from her, let her face break into a smile that betrayed the intense joy she had felt upon seeing him standing in the snow beneath her window. The same smile pulled at James's lips, safely buried in Lily's fiery hair.

They stayed like that for a long time. The cold wind gusted through Lily's pajama pants and James's jeans, but at least their arms, wrapped tightly around each other, were warm. Finally, Lily raised her head, meeting James's eyes, which betrayed a gentleness she didn't think she had ever seen there before.

"I missed you," James whispered. He didn't know why he was whispering, but speaking out loud somehow seemed too loud, too abrasive, as if the sound would shatter the calm which had settled around them.

Lily searched his eyes and was pleased at the sincerity she found there, but they betrayed much more. There was sincerity and longing, and there was also fear. Lily knew that fear. It was the same terror which crept into the edges of her dreams, which drove her to spend every waking moment with her loved ones. It was the fear of loss, the fear that He Who Must Not Be Named would rise up like a rearing cobra and strike down everything she loved. "I'm scared," she said. She had to voice it or it would come surging out of her like a river from a broken dam.

The small, loving smile that had been playing around James's lips faded in an instant. His eyes turned toward the ground and the faintest of blushes rose in his cheeks. "Me too," he whispered. He was ashamed of his fear. But before Lily could speak, could acknowledge and then quell his shame, James bent his head and pressed his lips to hers, wrapping his arms more tightly around her, drawing her closer to him. He kissed her with a passion born of immense love and immense fear. His kiss was rushed, urgent, and both of them poured into it all the words they had not said, all the love that threatened to burst from them at any second, and all the urgent panic that rose up within them when they sat by the window in the Gryffindor common room at Hogwarts in the evening, the boisterous voices of their friends fading as they watched another precious day fade into black.

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I wrote this instead of the next chapter of Breaking Point. I'm sorry! _ The idea just suddenly came to me, and I was having some trouble with the chapter anyway, so I just wrote this instead...

Anyway, thank you so so much for reading, and it'd be really lovely if you could review and let me know what you think :)


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